Andy Goldsworthy Quotes

My art recognizes the human place, the human context - especially in Britain, which is a landscape so worked by people for thousands of years, written, deeply ingrained with the presence of people.

Nature, for me is raw and dangerous and difficult and beautiful and unnerving.

Some of the snowballs have a kind of animal energy. Not just because of the materials inside them, but in the way that they appear caged, captured.

Sometimes you need to stop doing something to really see it afresh.

The hardened mass of liquid stones had much stronger qualities than those which had simply torn. The skin remained a recognisable part of the molten stone.

Art for me is a form of nourishment. I need the land. I need it.

We often forget that WE ARE NATURE. Nature is not something separate from us. So when we say that we have lost our connection to nature, we’ve lost our connection to ourselves.

When I’m working with materials it’s not just the leaf or the stone, it’s the processes that are behind them that are important. That’s what I’m trying to understand, not a single isolated object but nature as a whole.

Movement, change, light, growth and decay are the lifeblood of nature, the energies that I I try to tap through my work. I need the shock of touch, the resistance of place, materials and weather, the earth as my source. Nature is in a state of change and that change is the key to understanding. I want my art to be sensitive and alert to changes in material, season and weather. Each work grows, stays, decays. Process and decay are implicit. Transience in my work reflects what I find in nature.

When I make a work, I often take it to the very edge of its collapse, and that's a very beautiful balance.

A snowball is simple, direct and familiar to most of us. I use this simplicity as a container for feelings and ideas that function on many levels.

I've laid down in dried up streambeds, leaving a shadow. And then, five minutes later, it's flash flooded, and where I once laid is now running water, which would've washed me away, you know? There's that power and danger often in places that look so calm and pastoral to begin with.

Complete control can be the death of a work.

I want to get under the surface. When I work with a leaf, rock, stick, it is not just that material in itself, it is an opening into the processes of life within and around it. When I leave it, these processes continue.

The photography is not the aim of the work; the articulation of the work through photography is another way of understanding what's going on and what's happening outside.

Confrontation is something that I accept as part of the project though not its purpose.

There are occasions when I have moved boulders, but I'm reluctant to, especially ones that have been rooted in a place for many years.

We leave our presence in the pavement. We're walking over it, sitting on steps.

I knew the tree when it grew, and the tree is now gone. The farmers cut it up, and it's become firewood. And there's this tremendous sense of absence and shock and violence attendant to that collapsing tree.

Photography is a way of putting distance between myself and the work which sometimes helps me to see more clearly what it is that I have made.

Even in winter an isolated patch of snow has a special quality.

Everything has the energy of its making inside it.

People do not realise that many of my works are done in urban places. I was brought up on the edge of Leeds, five miles from the city centre-on one side were fields and on the other, the city.

Occasionally I have come across a last patch of snow on top of a mountain in late May or June. There's something very powerful about finding snow in summer.

The essence of drawing is the line exploring space.

I think that I'm always trying to get beyond the surface appearance of things, to go beyond what I can just see.

Not being able to touch is sometimes as interesting as being able to touch.

There is life in a stone. Any stone that sits in a field or lies on a beach takes on the memory of that place. You can feel that stones have witnessed so many things.

Stones are checked every so often to see if any have split or at worst exploded. An explosion can leave debris in the elements so the firing has to be abandoned.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole. I find nature as a whole disturbing. Nature can be harsh – difficult and brutal, as well as beautiful. You couldn't walk five minutes from here without coming across something that is dead or decaying.

I'm an artist living in a small, Scottish village. So one would expect to be treated with some sort of caution. And the village and the farmers have shown enormous tolerance of me and interest in what I do. I mean, they don't necessarily understand what I'm doing all the time. But they, you know, I think they respect what I do and that there is a connection between what they do with the land and what I do, you know, that we're both dependent on weather and respond to that.

When it does get below freezing and there is - it's cold enough for ice to form, then that changes the whole landscape, and it makes the landscape a different landscape to the one that I worked with previously. And I want to understand that. But the big tension of the ice works is that they're often made when it's cold enough to freeze one piece of ice to another.

I can't edit the materials I work with. My remit is to work with nature as a whole.

The things that I make are that which a person will make. They're not meant to mimic nature. They are nothing but the result of a hand of a person.

Design implies a sense of mapping something out and then you follow the plan.

I have worked with this red all over the world - in Japan, California, France, Britain, Australia - a vein running round the earth. It has taught me about the flow, energy and life that connects one place with another.

The British climate, although it is very wet, it is quite mild in winter. We don't get these severe - generally don't get severe winters.

If you lay in the rain, every rain shower, storm, whatever, is different. Every surface is different.

If I had to describe my work in one word, that word would be time.

I love the winter. Well, I love all the seasons, but the winter is possibly one of the most intense.

I take the opportunity each day offers.

I go way beyond just the wood and stone but to the process of growth and farming and the tensions between the two.

The main source of my income is through the commissions of the large-scale works and big sculptures, the projects.

Abandoning the project was incredibly stressful after having gone through the process of building the room, installing the kiln, collecting the stones, sitting with the kiln day and night as it came to temperature, experiencing the failures.

The relationship between the public and the artist is complex and difficult to explain. There is a fine line between using this critical energy creatively and pandering to it.

We often forget that we are nature.

I have six acres in front of my own house, which I very rarely work on. Most of the work occurs on farmers' fields around me. And I like the discipline of working on other people's land.